John Julius Norwich:'Deep down, I'm shallow. I really am'

John Julius Norwich: 'I loathe all this political correctness'

12:03AM BST 04 Jun 2008

Historian John Julius Norwich talks about his unusual parents and his own charmed life

John Julius Norwich once asked General de Gaulle if he could have his portion of apple pie, even though the old boy had dropped cigarette ash on it. He helped Hilaire Belloc with his cloak, almost collapsing under its clinking weight because every pocket contained a flask of alcohol, mostly spirits.

And he met the diminutive, squeaky-voiced HG Wells, Russian mistress in tow, and wondered why on earth women found him attractive. (Answer: his breath smelled of honey.)

The 2nd Viscount Norwich must be the only commuter on the Underground who came close enough to all three to form an opinion. The reason for the improbable encounters was his parents: Duff Cooper, the philandering diplomat, and the beautiful socialite Lady Diana.

The de Gaulle story sets the tone for a life of scrupulous congeniality. It was June 1946 and JJ had arrived late and famished in Arromanches, where assorted dignitaries were celebrating the second anniversary of D-Day.

The 16-year-old asked if he could have the French leader's untouched dessert, and the General indicated its light dusting. "I said that it would be an honour for me to eat his cigarette ash - an appalling piece of over-the-top flattery which I blush to recall."

JJ is good at this kind of dinner-party self-deprecation. He joyfully claims that his autobiography, Trying to Please, was rejected by every publisher in London because it didn't contain enough pain, drugs, sex or abuse.

"I've just had it too bloody easy all my life." Though he is a prolific popular historian, lecturer and broadcaster, originality is not his forte. "I have not discovered a single new historical fact in my life.

I like infecting other people with my own enthusiasm, but I am not interested in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. Deep down, I'm shallow. I really am."

Lady Diana denied him a literary scoop by revealing in her own autobiography that although she was brought up as a daughter of the Duke of Rutland, she was actually fathered by the Hon Harry Cust, from the neighbouring estate in Lincolnshire.

But JJ relegates to a footnote the rumour that Cust also slept with Margaret Thatcher's maternal grandmother, one of his servants. If true, this would make Viscount Norwich and Lady Thatcher first cousins.

"A DNA test would only take a couple of minutes," he says. "But I have never dared suggest it - except once to Carol Thatcher. She seemed moderately amused, but I never heard back."

The Coopers lavished huge affection on their only son, and protected him from any nastiness arising from her flirtations and his energetic infidelity. JJ describes himself as a stolid, unimaginative child, which may explain his failure to see that one of his favourite visitors, Louise de Vilmorin, was having a passionate affair with his father, then British ambassador in Paris.

"Did my mother know?" he asks. "Of course she did - and she didn't mind a bit. They had an incredibly happy marriage, but my father wasn't faithful to her for a single second.

There was scarcely a trace of jealousy in her character. She worshipped the ground he walked on, but she wasn't very highly sexed - she was quite glad that other women were taking the weight off her, as it were. I once asked her if she minded. She said: 'They were the flowers, but I was the tree.'"

When Duff went out in the evening, Lady Diana knew he was meeting "some beautiful girl", but preserved the domestic niceties, insisting that he wrapped up warmly. As he moved on, discarded mistresses would sob on her shoulder. Some became firm friends.

Duff Cooper wrote that he hoped his son would never read his diaries but JJ published them in 2005.

Some critics applauded but others thought that Duff's political commentary (he was a Cabinet minister and close to both Edward VIII and Winston Churchill) was overshadowed by the woman-chasing.

JJ says he thought long and hard about editing out the rakish aspects, but decided that sexual conquest was "so much part of his character" it had to be left in.

"My father had an awful lot of women. That was just the way he was. He made Nick Clegg [who claimed to have slept with about 30 women] look like a beginner."

JJ treats his own private life with unfashionable discretion, however. In the book, there's barely a hint of the havoc caused when Anne, his first wife, discovered that he had been having a five-year affair with Ricki, the estranged wife of the film director John Huston, and that they had a daughter, Allegra.

Anne fell to pieces and had to have psychiatric care, but JJ insists that she got over it quite quickly and they now enjoy a brother-sister relationship.

After the affair had spluttered out, Ricki Huston died in a car accident. Anne offered to look after Allegra, then three - "an act of generosity I shall never forget". But Huston, who had just remarried, desperately wanted a child, and so brought Allegra up until she was nine.

"From one point of view it was a relief," admits JJ. "But was it a dereliction of duty? I was in such turmoil that I didn't know what I thought or felt. There was never any secret that Allegra was my daughter. She has been a member of our family for 25 years now.

" JJ is equally blithe about his second wife, Mollie, who was married with four children when they met in the London Library. They live in a town house in Little Venice, for which he paid £7,200 in 1960.

"I've always been fairly skint," he says. "That's why I go on working. After I left the diplomatic service in 1964 and turned to writing, I wondered where my next meal was coming from. My father was a terrific spendthrift. Mother much the same. I inherited virtually nothing."

Despite arthritic ankles, JJ takes the Tube most days to the London Library. "I have my lovely Freedom Pass, which makes all the difference to my life. It saves me £16 a day. We even go out to dinner by Tube."

Suddenly, he remembers why.

"I loathe all this political correctness," he grumbles. "I miss the days when one could drive to dinner and not worry about being picked up for drink driving on the way back. I drove home over the limit every night for decades and I don't believe I was a danger to anybody."

He admired his elderly mother's defiance of traffic regulations. She would hurtle at terrifying speeds in her Mini, drive along the pavement and flout parking restrictions with notes pleading: "Dearest Warden - Front tooth broken off: look like 81-year-old pirate, so at dentist at 19a. Very old, very lame, no metres [sic]. Have mercy!"

The extraordinary thing, he notes, is how often it worked.

At 78, JJ is still writing, broadcasting and travelling. The day after our meeting, he was due in Chicago to deliver one of his 20 lectures a year. In October, he goes to Bhutan. Last year he took his granddaughter to the Antarctic.

The thought of taking it easy alarms him. "If I stop, I'll get Alzheimer's. I dread it more than anything. I feel that fetid breath on my neck every time I can't remember the name of the chap up the road."

He has made a living will, in the event that he becomes mentally incapacitated. "My children have strict instructions to pull out the plug. I am not going to lie there and have them spend millions on a cabbage."

•'Trying to Please' by John Julius Norwich (Dovecote Press, £20) is available from Telegraph Books for £18 + £1.25 p&p. To order, call 0870 428 4112 or go to www.books.telegraph.co.uk